Habit, if wisely and skillfully formed, becomes truly a second
nature; but unskillfully and unmethodically depicted, it will be
as it were an ape of nature, which imitates nothing to the life,
but only clumsily and awkwardly.
- Francis Bacon

A single bad habit will mar an otherwise faultless character, as
an ink-drop soileth the pure white page.
- Hosea Ballou

I will be a slave to no habit; therefore farewell tobacco.
- Hosea Ballou

Marriage should combat without respite or mercy that monster
which devours everything,--habit.
- Honore de Balzac

The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man,
constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the
words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a
bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and
change at the will of civilizations.
- Honore de Balzac

The law of the harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act,
and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow
a character, and you reap a destiny.
- George Dana Boardman, the younger

Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding the truth--of
carefully respecting the property of others--of scrupulously
abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can involve him in
distress, and he will just as likely think of rushing into the
element in which he cannot breathe, as of lying or cheating or
stealing.
- Lord Henry Peter Brougham (Brougham and vaux)

I trust everything, under God, to habit, upon which, in all ages,
the lawgiver, as well as the schoolmaster, has mainly placed his
reliance,--habit, which makes everything easy, and casts all
difficulties upon the deviation from the wonted course.
- Lord Henry Peter Brougham (Brougham and vaux)

Make sobriety a habit, and intemperance will be hateful; make
prudence a habit, and reckless profligacy will be as contrary to
the nature of the child, grown or adult, as the most atrocious
crimes, are to any of us.
- Lord Henry Peter Brougham (Brougham and vaux)

If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year,
you would end by believing him.
- Edmund Burke

Habit and imitation--there is nothing more perennial in us than
these two. They are the source of all working, and all
apprenticeship, of all practice, and all learning, in this world.
- Thomas Carlyle

Acts of virtue ripen into habits; and the goodly and permanent
result is the formation or establishment of a virtuous character.
- Thomas Chalmers

Vicious habits are so great a stain to human nature, and so
odious in themselves, that every person actuated by right reason
would avoid them, though he were sure they would be always
concealed both from God and man, and had no future punishment
entailed upon them.
- Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) (often called "Tully" for short)

Centres, or centre-pieces of wood, are put by builders under an
arch of stone while it is in the process of construction till the
keystone is put in. Just such is the use Satan makes of
pleasures to construct evil habits upon; the pleasure lasts till
the habit is fully formed; but that done the habit may stand
eternal. The pleasures are sent for firewood, and the hell
begins in this life.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge